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Tom Ford's debut film, based on a novel A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood. The story is rather interesting, and there are amazing actors in it.. and oh, the production design time is apparently the same as Mad Men. Everything sounds promising, it's really in Tom's hands now..

^ Oh i didnt know that, been waiting for the trailer so thanks for posting simons.

Didn't read the book, but i heard good things about it and planned to, but never got around to it, so now i will rather see the movie first, since in my experience the pictures never do them justice.I always end up thinking the book was much better since you can only so much translate on the big screen.

But the trailer looks stunning, cinematography looks amazing i have faith in Tom, and he got a great cast, it all looks well done.Hopefully he didnt do to much graphic sex.

Like the speck of sand that seeds a pearl, it's the tiny fleck of kitsch at the heart of "A Single Man" that makes it luminous and treasurable, despite its imperfections. An impressive helming debut for fashion designer Tom Ford, who co-wrote the script with David Scearce, pic freely adapts Christopher Isherwood's seminal novel set in Los Angeles, circa 1962, in which a college prof (Colin Firth), grieving for his dead lover, contemplates death. Sterling perfs from a tony cast rep a selling point, but the film's ripely homoerotic flavor will make finding lovers in the sticks more difficult.

Described by novelist Edmund White as "one of the first and best novels of the modern gay liberation movement," Isherwood's "A Single Man" presents a stream-of-consciousness portrait of a middle-aged gay man, known only as George, going about his daily routine in early '60s LA. Ford's script, which, per the press notes, departs significantly from Scearce's earlier draft, remains fairly close in spirit to the original but departs from it in one major direction: Here, Brit expat George Falconer (Firth) is so bereft over the recent death of his longtime companion, Jim (Matthew Goode), in a car accident, that he's planning to commit suicide -- a plot point that injects tension into what might have been too quotidian a story had Isherwood's template been followed to the letter.

Action is confined to a single day, during which George puts his affairs in order. Telling no one of his plans, he follows what's clearly a routine schedule -- bantering with his housekeeper (Paulette Lamori), exchanging polite pleasantries with the all-American family next door and teaching his English class at a small college.
Already detaching himself from the now, George can barely muster the energy to argue with a colleague (Lee Pace) about the ongoing Cuban Missile Crisis unfolding on the news. However, one of his students, the beautifully chiseled Kenny (Nicholas Hoult, the kid from "About a Boy," now all grown up) insists on approaching George to discuss literature, drugs and life in general; the glint in Kenny's eye hints at something more than purely educational interest.

After a chaste afternoon encounter with a yet another gorgeous man (Jon Kortajarena), clearly a hustler looking for trade, George makes his way to the house of his friend Charley (Julianne Moore) for dinner that evening. An old friend from Blightly whom George once slept with, as flashbacks reveal, now-dipsomaniac divorcee Charley still can't accept that George, whom she knows is gay, will never want a "normal" married life with her, despite their rich friendship. Scene in which she makes what is presumably the latest in a long line of drunken passes at him is a classic, demonstrating extraordinary emotional nuance from Firth and Moore, both of whom firmly grasp the best roles either has had in some time.

Ford's largely delicate touch reps a pleasant surprise, especially given his only filmmaking experience hitherto has been overseeing advertising campaigns for Gucci and his own current, self-named line of fashion products. Clearly this is material close to his heart, and the empathy shines through. What's more impressive is the skill he shows at evoking quietly sensual details, conjuring how, for instance, sniffing a stranger's dog brings back memories of George's beloved pet.

Less surprising, given Ford's background, is the just-so exquisiteness of the overall look, not just in the men's clothes (Ford designed Firth's and Hoult's figure-hugging suits and casual outfits himself), but in the interiors and femme costumes, too, for which production designer Dan Bishop and costume designer Arianne Phillips respectively deserve co-credit. The way Charley's pink-and-gold parlor harmonizes not just with her sweeping monochrome dress but also her pink Sobranie cigarettes will evoke swoons of delight in auds for whom magazines like Wallpaper and Architectural Digest are holy writ.
Indeed, the period detailing is almost too perfectly done, to the point where one can't help sensing the adman in Ford, nursing every detail to look not just accurate but impeccable and fashion-forward. Avid fans of "Mad Men" will notice not only that those pink Sobranies featured in an episode a few weeks before "A Single Man" premiered in Venice, but also that "Mad Men" gets the occasional ugliness of the period's design better. An uncredited, voice-only appearance here by "Mad Men's" Jon Hamm further evokes the series.

It might be argued that Ford is so keen to show immaculate taste, he'll make sacrifices at the expense of verisimilitude, except that one key element in the filmmaking really does show an almost vulgar streak: Ford and lenser Eduard Grau's decision to play with the color saturation, so that the initially dun-and-dreary color scheme will suddenly morph in a single shot to a warmer palette, as if the lovely things George sees -- a handsome face, a pretty blue dress -- have literally brightened his day. The effect might have come off better if it had been more subtly deployed, but then again, that little quantum of kitsch might turn out to be what will make auds love this film all the more in years to come.

It’s no surprise that the feature film directing debut of fashion designer Tom Ford is a thing of heart-stopping beauty. He celebrates the male form with a sensual reverence. He uses colour with the visual articulacy of Wong Kar Wai and frames his shots with elegance and wit. It looks like a Wallpaper magazine photo shoot styled by Douglas Sirk. But what is a little more unexpected, certainly for those who were suspicious of Ford’s background in the ephemeral world of fashion, is that this is no frothy, throwaway piece of pretty silliness. Rather it’s a work of emotional honesty and authenticity which announces the arrival of a serious filmmaking talent. There will be critics who will be unable to get past the director’s background, but rest assured: Tom Ford is the real deal.

Ford’s decision to adapt Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man shows that he is not shy of a challenge. Isherwood’s novel charts a day in the life of George Falconer, a recently-bereaved gay college lecturer in early 1960s LA. The book unfolds predominantly through an interior monologue, a device which is notoriously tricky to transfer to the big screen without resorting to pages of cumbersome voice-over. Ford sidesteps this by keeping the narration to a minimum and instead giving us vivid little glimpses into George’s bruised psyche with some well-chosen flashbacks.

Ford brings one major change to the material. Rather than wander from encounter to encounter through the day, his George is given a purpose – a suicide he plans for with the same precision and impeccable good taste that he brings to everything else in his life. Knowing that this might be his last day on earth, George sees the quotidian banalities of his day to day life with fresh eyes and a new appreciation. The nearness of death makes him more alive than he has been for months. To convey this, Ford warms the colour. George’s grief and loneliness is grey but he rediscovers the world in saturated technicolor. It’s an effective technique but could have done with being dialled down a little, perhaps more subliminal than overt.

In the role of George, Colin Firth gives one of the finest, most affecting performances of his career. Two moments stand out: a flashback to the fateful telephone call which told him of his lover Jim’s death. The camera rests steadily on his face as his world crumbles. It’s a devastating piece of acting. And there’s a lovely little detail later in the film – George buries his face in the fur of a terrier puppy, recapturing the sense memory of doggy smells and happier days spent with Jim and their own pets. More than anything, it’s Ford’s eye for evocative details like this that makes A Single Man such an impressive debut.

^ You Tube has been insanely annoying lately, deleting stuff left and right, ugh.

Review from Screendaily:

Quote:

Fashion designer Tom Ford gets it spectacularly right first time round in his directorial debut, A Single Man. This adaptation of the 1964 novel by Christopher Isherwood about a gay British college professor in LA coping with the death of his partner is both stylistically assured and quietly moving as it charts a day in a life that has been scooped out but also spiritualised by grief and loss. It also represents a quantum leap for Colin Firth, who gives his most nuanced, compelling performance to date in the lead role.

Warmly received at its Venice world premiere – there was a standing ovation for the director and cast even in the press conference – this intelligent, reflective melodrama should reap more plaudits in Toronto. Once it steps outside of the gated festival community, however, A Single Man will need to put up a commercial fight – despite the rave reviews, the Firth-Moore pairing, and the media interest surrounding Ford’s first movie foray, audiences will still need to talked into an autumnal period drama about a gay 52-year-old mourning the death of his partner and contemplating his own.

But Brokeback Mountain has already done some of the prep work for Ford, and the awards season nominations this fine closet melodrama should receive will do some more. Given the right timing, A Single Man should play well at the broader end of the prestige arthouse market.
The script does a fine job of turning the book’s stream-of-consciousness narration into a more objective but still profoundly empathetic view of literature professor George Falconer (Firth), whose partner of sixteen years, Jim (Goode) died in a car accident eight months before. George gets dressed, watches his suburban neighbours from his perch on the loo and drives into work while the radio news yabbers on about the Cuban missile crisis (the film is set in late autumn 1962). He goes through the motions but flashbacks, restrained passages of first-person voice-over, montage, musical pointing and Firth’s sensitive performance reveal that this elegant, private man, whose suit (by Tom Ford, of course), glasses and hairstyle lend him more than a passing resemblance to Yves-Saint-Laurent, is nursing a hurt that time has not healed.
On campus, George departs from the set text to lecture his college class about minorities and society’s manipulation of fear. This being 1962, the gay agenda stays in the subtext of his monologue, and the tension this creates resonates throughout the film – which is in part about private freedom (symbolised not by sex, of which there is none, but more than once by nakedness) and public repression. Production design plays its part here too: George’s house – an airy wood and glass modernist structure – is open to wild nature, but all around him is a conformist, repressive, manicured suburbia.
Three pivotal encounters – with Kenny (Hoult), a pretty-boy college student who appears to be stalking George, with a Spanish rent boy, and with his best friend Charlotte, aka Charley (Julianne Moore) slice up George’s day and keep getting in the way of his early-flagged intention to commit suicide.

Though her ya-ya English accent is not the best she’s ever done, Moore is a worthy support to Firth as a lonely, gin-tippling woman who is still in love with her best friend (they had a brief sexual relationship many years before) and torn between sympathy for him and regret about what might have been if he hadn’t turned into a “****ing poof”. The film is good at evoking and sparking such complex emotions, but it resonates above all because of the way it turns a single man’s single day into a spiritual journey from despair to transfiguration.

The one real wobble in an otherwise stylish package is the director’s use of bizarre colour boosts – from the default washed-out look to blazing technicolour – to signal moments of hope, life and redemption. The idea is sound – but it should have been more subtly managed.